Far From Home, Foreign in My Own Country

AYUSHI DAHAL

There is a particular kind of loneliness that comes from being twelve hundred kilometres from your mother and yet still being asked, almost daily, where you are actually from. I came to Delhi for my law internship at one of the country's leading law firms, writing part time on the side, carrying the ordinary anxieties of any intern: deadlines, drafts, deference to seniors, rent. I did not expect that the hardest part of the assignment would be surviving as myself, a woman from Sikkim, in a city that often cannot place me on its map of India.

This is not an abstraction I have invented to make a point. In February this year, three women from Arunachal Pradesh, one of them preparing for the civil services, were subjected to a torrent of racial abuse by their neighbours in South Delhi's Malviya Nagar, after dust from an air conditioner installation drifted into the flat below. What began as a petty dispute over drilling debris turned, by several accounts, into a stream of slurs and insults, with the women called derogatory names and accused of working in massage parlours. The couple, Harsh Singh and his wife Ruby Jain, allegedly hurled these slurs during what was initially a small disagreement about the dust. Delhi Police registered an FIR against the couple under provisions covering intent to insult a woman's modesty, criminal intimidation, and promoting enmity on grounds of race and place of birth. The couple was placed in judicial custody, though no arrests had been made at the time of reporting.

The video went viral. There was outrage, as there always is, for a few days. The women's advocate asked a question that has been asked for as long as I can remember hearing it: why should people from the Northeast be treated like outsiders in their own country, when they are as Indian as anyone else. It is a fair question, and an old one. It did not start this February, and it will not end with one FIR.

I want to be careful here, because this is not an accusation aimed at a people or a place. Delhi has also given me kindness: a co intern who came in specially when I fell sick, a friend's mother who invited me over for dinner and, when ten thirty felt too late for me to travel back alone, simply told me to stay the night. And yet, as we approach Independence Day, a strange aloofness settles over me, because the slurs in the Malviya Nagar case came from a woman, aimed at other women. That detail does not sit lightly. The words themselves, and everything they were made to mean, stay lodged somewhere deep, an ache that does not leave easily.

Out of everything, what has stayed with me most is not the abuse of strangers but of someone I knew. A known acquaintance once called me names in a language many of us do not even fully understand, and there is a particular sting in being wounded by a word whose exact meaning you have to look up afterward, alone, at your desk. There have been calls at eleven at night too, voices warning that they would come find me, that I should watch how I spoke or where I walked. These are not abstractions from a news report. They are the small, private terrors that sit underneath every larger headline about the Northeast in Delhi, rarely spoken of because they feel too ordinary to report and too frightening to repeat.

The problem, I remind myself, is not North Indians as a whole, any more than the problem is Northeasterners as a whole. It is a habit of mind, decades old, in which the Northeast is treated as a frontier rather than a homeland, a place people are from, rarely a place people are of. That habit shows up in slurs muttered on the street, but also in softer forms: the surprise when we speak fluent Hindi, the assumption that we are foreigners who need directions to our own embassy, the jokes about our eyes and our food that are supposed to be harmless.

As India moves toward its eightieth year of independence, this is worth sitting with honestly. Independence was supposed to mean that no citizen needed a passport to belong within their own borders. Yet for many of us from Sikkim, Assam, Manipur, Nagaland, Arunachal, and beyond, belonging in Delhi still feels conditional, granted on good days, withdrawn on bad ones. I keep returning to Ruby Jain, herself a woman, reaching for words that reduce other women to their bodies and their supposed profession. It tells me that solidarity among women cannot be assumed simply because we share a gender. It has to be built, deliberately, across the very lines of region and language that this country still lets divide us.

This is why so many of us, after our internships and postings, quietly choose to go home. Not because we lack ambition, but because home does not ask us to justify our Indian ness before it lets us in. I do not know yet if Delhi will ever feel like that to me. Between case files by day and my own writing by night, I am doing what my mother taught me to do when a mountain road narrows: keep walking, carefully, and do not look down. But I would like, someday, for the walking to feel less like survival, and more like simply living, in a city that is, after all, also mine.

And perhaps that is the part of this story that gets lost in headlines about slurs and FIRs, I am, myself, half North Indian. My mother's family settled in Sikkim generations ago, carried there from Lucknow and from the printing presses of Kanpur, and their journey is stitched as firmly into who I am as any mountain in the east. So, when I am told to go back to where I came from, I want to ask, gently, which half of me they mean. I am not an outsider borrowing a place in this country. I am, in every sense that matters, as Indian as the both of us, and that should be reason enough to belong everywhere within it.

(ayushidahal6@gmail.com)